Category Archives: IMMIGRATION

“Pathway To Citizenship”: What Will Happen If President Trump Says Those Words, Tomorrow

Bush, Donald Trump, IMMIGRATION, Neoconservatism, Republicans

A source who shall remain anonymous writes:

If tomorrow night President Donald Trump utters the words “pathway to citizenship,” it will mark one of the biggest betrayals of the modern era and the effective end of his presidency.

1) He will cause the 2018 midterms to be a Democratic victory as a significant part of the demoralized and disillusioned base stays home and we lose the House – and perhaps even the senate.

2) Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats will impeach him in the House.

3) A Democrat-controlled Senate will proceed with a trial. A Republican-controlled Senate will not proceed with trial but nothing Trump wants will come out of the House and his “America First” agenda will be neutralized.

4) Trump will be challenged from the Right in the 2020 presidential primaries.

My well-connected source’s own sources tell him that, “Trump is proceeding down this road of self-immolation”:

The Koch brothers successfully infiltrated their agent, Marc Short, into the inner sanctum. Short, who led the Koch’s Never Trump movement in 2016, has teamed up with Establishment lackey Kirstjen Nielsen [with whom I was actually quite taken] and the princess regent Ivanka [whom I’ve grown to detest] to sideline and neutralize Stephen Miller, the last remaining voice for immigration sanity. [First they came for Steve Bannon, now it’s Steve Miller’s turn.]

Trump is being pushed off the cliff with all the happy talk from this cabal, buttressed by Lindsay Graham, Marco Rubio, Jeff Flake and Paul Ryan. In summation, the entire rabid Never Trump partisans are now in control of POTUS and are succeeding in getting him to do their immigration policy:

Amnesty now. Enforcement later, maybe.

No effectual changes to chain migration for at least ten years since all pre-existing applicants for green cards are grandfathered in . That’s at least a ten-year backlog.

This is the 1986 Bill on steroids.

The headline, all over conservative and populist media on Wednesday morning will be one word: betrayal.

We who want Trump to succeed have been trying to head this off all week, since this country killing plan was first floated in the press. Seemingly to no avail. Trump is cocooned, just as he was and continues to be on foreign policy. He’s captive to the neocon interventionists AND now to the open borders, cheap-labor lobby as well.

It’s as if we had elected JEB Bush.

This is NOT America First.

What a colossal disappointment. On Wednesday morning Trump supporters will be in disarray, the Conservative movement will be fractured and, once again, Republicans will be at each other’s throats – as the Kochs, the Bushes, Bill Kristol and all the other members of the Never Trump cabal are filled with glee and satisfaction as they celebrate the beginning of the end of his presidency.

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Salvadorean Temporary Residents Are Not Being Deported, Only Stripped Of Special Status. For Now.

Crime, Economy, Homeland Security, Human Accomplishment, IMMIGRATION

On January 8th, 2018, “the United States’ Department of Homeland Security had announced that it would end temporary protected status (TPS) for nearly 200,000 Salvadoreans who got” a generous grant of privilege from the US government in the late 1990s:

… permission to live and work in the country after a pair of earthquakes struck El Salvador in 2001. the United States’ Department of Homeland Security had announced that it would end temporary protected status (TPS) for nearly 200,000 Salvadoreans who got permission to live and work in the country after a pair of earthquakes struck El Salvador in 2001. .. The Salvadoreans are not alone. Smaller numbers of Hondurans and Nicaraguans were granted TPS after Hurricane Mitch wreaked havoc in 1998 (see chart).

… Citizens of all three Central American countries had their status renewed every 18 months for nearly two decades. Donald Trump, who promised to get tough on immigrants when he was campaigning for president, has found TPS a convenient way to keep that pledge.

Ditto “Haitians who were stranded after an earthquake in 2010.” Hondurans may be next.

To emphasize, Salvadorean temporary residents are not yet being deported (I doubt they ever will); only stripped of special status.

One wonders: Is the revoking of temporary protected status (TPS) for central Americans an easy issue on which to appear tough on immigration?

Wondering whether El Salvador a shithole country? Of course not. No unless you consider the following facts a hallmark of shittyness:

* It’s gang-ridden, home to MS-13, which has branches across America.
* Its GDP is pitiful. In fact, “Remittances from Salvadoreans living in the United States account for a colossal 17% of GDP.”
* “[M]ore than 40% of workers are underemployed and two-thirds are in the informal sector. The economy creates 11,000 jobs a year for the 60,000 people who enter the workforce.”

But hey, “192,000 Salvadoreans children were born in the United States.” This means they can bring in those who may have to leave and many more. And in any case, “around half of the 195,000 Salvadorean TPS holders will be eligible to apply for permanent residence.”

So the question asked above is answered: TPS revocation represents more political optics than authentic change for Americans.

How much exactly do the American people’s legislators care about the  American people?

Enough to write “four proposed bills [which] would offer permanent residency to temporary protected status holders from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras and Nicaragua. Some of those have bipartisan support.”

That’s how much!

MORE in The Economist.

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NEW COLUMN: Trump’s ‘S-ithole’ Controversy Deconstructed (Part 1)

Africa, Donald Trump, IMMIGRATION, Race, The West

“Trump’s ‘Shithole’ Controversy Deconstructed (Part 1)” is the current column, now on Townhall.com (WND.com, Storia.me, Constitution.com, etc.):

President Trump’s questioning of immigration into the United States from what he crudely called “s-ithole” countries masks a more vexing question:

What makes a country, the place or the people? Does “the country” create the man or does the man make the country?

To listen to the deformed logic of the president’s detractors, it’s the former: the “country” makes the person. No sooner does an African or Haitian immigrant wash up on American shores—thanks to random quotas and set-asides, lotteries and other government grants of privilege and protection—than the process of cultural and philosophical osmosis begins. American probity and productivity soon become his own.

As an African libertarian—an ex-South African, to be precise—I took the liberty of addressing the matter in the book “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in which a Cameroonian scholar, Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, among others, is extensively cited.

Easily one of the most controversial thinkers on the causes of underdevelopment in Africa, Etounga-Manguelle, a former adviser to the World Bank, contends that “What Africans are doing to one another defies credulity. Genocide, bloody civil wars, and rampant violent crime suggest African societies at all social levels are to some extent cannibalistic.” Why so? In part, because of the inveterate values held by so many Africans.

Etounga-Manguelle and scholars like him, cited in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot,” are responding to an “explanatory vacuum” that has opened up among honest academics.

All have been willing to admit that constructs like racism, discrimination, and colonialism no longer serve as credible causal factors in divining underdevelopment and delinquency.

None has been called upon to enlighten the greater public.

In such intellectually candid circles, the intellectual “vacuum” is being filled with reference to culture, namely the “values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society.”

The idea that culture is benign and harmonious if not disrupted is a delusion, argues anthropologist Robert B. Edgerton, who also believes that in Africa, “traditional cultural values are at the root of poverty, authoritarianism, and injustice.”

By taking account of culture, posits David Landes, a Harvard economic historian, and author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, one could have foreseen the postwar economic success of Japan and Germany. The same is true of South Korea (versus Turkey), and Indonesia (versus Nigeria).

Before the end of free speech on American campuses, Etounga-Manguelle, aforementioned, attended a symposium on “Cultural Values and Human Progress” at Harvard, circa 1999. He had come to bury and not praise the cultures of his Continent. …

READ THE REST. “Trump’s ‘Shithole’ Controversy Deconstructed (Part 1)” is the current column, now on Townhall.com.

Read the weekly column on WND.com, The Unz Review, Storia.me, Constitution.com, and other outlets. Sign up to receive my weekly column, now in its 19th year, here: http://www.ilanamercer.com/mailing-list/.  Catch up @ ilanamercer.com.

UPDATED (2/2/018): Reversion To The Neoconservative Mean On Immigration & In Commentary? Sure Looks Like It.

Donald Trump, IMMIGRATION, Israel, Media, Neoconservatism

Look, the establishment has never been on the same page as the people when it comes to immigration. So, to talk about a reversion to the neoconservative mean is probably slightly inaccurate. But in 2016, when Candidate Trump was in full Deplorable mode, Fox News would have been less neoconservative on immigration. However, as Fox News shifts back to its neoconservative happy place, no discussion of an immigration moratorium will percolate through the noise on that channel (other than on the great Tucker Carlson’s show).

Duly, on January 9, I believe it was, neoconservative broadcaster Tammy Bruce insisted that not sending home Salvadorians temporarily in the US prevents others—Mexicans, Filipinos, Yemenis, in Bruce’s words—from entering the United States. LEGALLY. All this unfolded on The Story with Martha MacCallum.

No doubt, President Trump has shifted the immigration debate immeasurably. But I suspect the consensus in the immigration debate will begin to shift back to the pre-Trump era, as Bruce’s imbecilic quip indicates.

Although an immigration moratorium is desperately needed, at one million individuals a year—legal immigration will continue to be touted as the American Way. The ONLY way. The objection being to illegal immigration only, and not to the transformative powers of mass immigration.

Foreign policy has certainly seen the normalization of neoconservatism, echoed in the hiring by Breitbart of Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick. Glick, whose writing I’m unable to plow through, is hardly an America Firster. However, Deplorables, apparently, need schooling from an Israel First, war-war-monger.

I say this as the quintessential (probably the original ), pro-Israel,  America First, libertarian, Jewish writer. See “The Titan is Tired,” for an example.

Here’s my critique of Glick’s weak One-State solution gibberish: “One State: Is It The Solution Or The Final Solution To The Jewish State?“

UPDATE I (2/2/018): It’s spreading, or taking hold again: the neoconservative blight, evinced in “Trump Is Echoing Talleyrand In His Middle East Diplomacy. That’s Right. Talleyrand”:

Talleyrand? Wasn’t he a slightly diluted, cunning Jacobin, responsible for anti-clergy moves during the French Revolution, which was 100 percent the antithesis of the American Revolution? Indeed, conservatives are duped by and enamored of the modern-day Jacobins.

UPDATE II (3/26):

Bolton:

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